Meeting Shorts

This month’s meeting started in a reflective mood with a two minutes’ silence to mark the 100th anversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

It was also fitting that an oil painting normally on show in Newark Town Hall Museum was loaned to St Paul’s Cathedral as part of the Battle of the Somme commemorations.The painting, Poppies, by Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was chosen because of the symbolism of poppies to remember those who died in battle.

Growth Mindset

Sponsored by Worksop College Preparatory School, Ranby House, whose headmaster, Christian Pritchard, spoke about the importance of pupils, staff and parents having a growth mindset.

Employee Rewards

Jill Brown of the retail group spoke about the success of the Newark Festival weekend, and the engagement created between shoppers and businesses through the Totally Locally retail Appand the Facebook campaign.

She had been approached by a Bakkavor in the town about rewarding employees with vouchers to spend in the town with independent companies rather than at a national cinema chain as they have in the past.

The retail app is using as part of the campaign.

Trade Delegation to China

Mayor of Newark Dean Hyde is considering putting together a trade delegation to China, and asked interested businesess to get in touch.

Dean has also been working as part of the Mayor's clean up team de-weeding and litter picking the area around the Town Lock ahead of Newark in Bloom.

Sports Hub makes progress

Steff Wright, the chairman of Newark Sports Association, a not-for-profit community business with a wide membership of local sports clubs and individuals wanting to enhance sports facilities in the town, spoke about plans for the Newark Sports Hub.

The site, next to the new leisure centre, and owned by Newark and Sherwood District Council, is a great location for the facility, and would include a 750m closed loop cycle track for which a planning application has been submitted with further plans being developed for 3G training pitches, a football stadium, athletics track and tennis courts

A feasibility study has been completed and a partnership agreement between the Newark Sports Association, Newark & Sherwood District Council and Newark Town Council has been set up to move the idea forward.

Steff invited interested business club members to get involved in this exciting initiative for the town.

Committees

Ranby House preparing pupils for the future

Worksop College Preparatory School, Ranby House, is a Growth Mindset School, believing the concept to be a vital component in children’s learning. Headmaster Christian Pritchard explains.

I want all children to lead highly successful lives in their future and to be the best they can be in all that they do. At our school, we believe that children today should be taught a highly refined set of skills, alongside their academic learning, to be truly successful. A vital component of this is our growth mindset approach to learning.

This is critical to a child’s future success as there are two ways of looking at the world:

With a fixed mindset, a child believes that intelligence and talent are fixed at birth, often because they are told this by adults. Fixed mindset learners feel the need to look clever at all costs, as learning should come naturally. They constantly compare themselves to others and aim to hide mistakes, as these are seen as signs of weakness.

With a growth mindset, a child believes that intelligence and talent can go up or down. A growth mindset thinker therefore learns at all costs, compares their progress to themselves and understands it will be hard work. Growth mindset learners see mistakes as learning opportunities.
Our feedback to children is critical in the process. Every word and action from an adult to a child sends a message. Are we saying “you have permanent traits and I am judging them” or “you are a developing person and I am interested in you?”

Simply praising children’s intelligence or perceived talent (e.g. well done that is an excellent piece of writing) sends out a fixed mindset message, ‘I am judging the finished product’. What if the child thought they could do better, or worse, stops writing altogether because they cannot better ‘excellent’?

By contrast, growth mindset feedback focuses on the process, the strategy, the amount of effort and choices instead (i.e. this piece of writing is much stronger than your last piece as I can see you have worked hard to improve your use of verbs and adjectives from the last piece).
With a growth mindset approach to learning, children start taking greater risks. This is encouraged and, in turn, leads them to ‘fail successfully’ more often. Our children therefore develop a bounce back ability when they fail and are internally driven to better themselves.

They understand that true success comes from relentless hard work and effort. This level of growth mindset thinking sets our children up for life.
Ranby House Prep School is non-selective, classes are small and opportunities abundant. We provide our children with a world class, vibrant, connected learning experience from three to eleven years of age that seamlessly continues to eighteen, at our College in Worksop.
Our children learn with growing resilience, adaptability and independence, in a caring, challenging and stimulating environment. Our children’s high academic, spiritual, social and emotional achievements are due to the personalised care and attention each and every child receives. Our team tailors the learning to meet the individual needs of our pupils and provides a broad, challenging curriculum embracing 21st Century learning, creativity, science, technology, the arts and sport.
To see how we would inspire your child, please do come and visit and meet the Headmaster, staff and pupils. You are always assured of a warm welcome!

Virgin Trains East Coast update (Business card draw- June)

At Virgin Trains East Coast, we pride ourselves on being industry-leading, which we’re continuing to do with the launch of BEAM, our on-board entertainment service which is streamed directly to customers’ own devices. It’ll give passengers over 130 hours of coverage, including films, TV shows, magazines and games. All they need to do is download the BEAM app from the Apple or Android app stores

Investment in Stations. Wifi, Plush Tush set refurbishment
We’ve given eight of our First Class lounges the Virgin treatment, tripling seating capacity across the route and providing more options to hold meetings, work and unwind. We’ve also already invested £40 million in our existing trains since we took over the franchise, fitting them out with brand new interiors including new carpets and leather seats in First Class to deliver a more comfortable experience for our passengers, and Wi-Fi is now free in Standard Class for passengers who book their tickets through our website

Investment in Newark
As part of our station investment programme, we’re improving Newark North Gate for our passengers. We’re creating an additional 24 car parking spaces, and making free Wi-Fi available throughout the station. By the start of next year the revamped station front will be complete, with new waiting rooms and canopies on platforms 2 and 3 arriving by the end of next year.

Additional services to Edinburgh
We launched our new services to Edinburgh on 16 May with the Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell MP. Our new timetable means that there’ll be 42 additional trains connecting the UK and Scottish capitals every week, adding 22,000 seats to the weekly capacity and making the service near half hourly. As a result we’ve already seen a surge of bookings for journeys across the border, up by 15% compared with last year.

Access rights for Lincoln Services agreed.We applied for a new nine-year track access contract to help us achieve major improvements to our timetable from May 2019, which would allow us to make full use of our Azuma trains. The Office of Rail and Road have now approved our application to run all our future services, which is in the best interest of passengers, taxpayers, and communities along our route. We are delighted that the benefits of our services have been recognised, and we’re looking forward to providing communities in Lincoln with seven northbound and six southbound services on weekdays to London, an increase from one daily service.

Next Meeting

Friday 1st August 7am

Everyday Champions Centre

Newark Business Club meets at the Everyday Champions Conference Centre at 7am. Entry fee £5.00 including coffee. Come early to secure a good seat.